How Kamala Harris took over TikTok

And why it (could) matter.

Jul 31, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris with a pair of Howard University students. (Photo by the White House)

OK, let’s talk about the coconut memes.

I’m obviously someone who’s highly engaged in politics but, for the most part, I’ve managed to keep my TikTok feed largely apolitical — a respite from the rest of social media, where (partly out of professional obligation) I’m flooded with political content day and night.

At least, that held true until the last few weeks, when videos of Kamala Harris slowly started creeping into my “For You” page. Many of my friends, including some who don’t follow politics particularly closely, have said the same thing.

Between references to Harris’ highly-memed 2023 comment (“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”) and declarations that Harris is “brat” (a reference to the recent Charlie XCX album, spurred on by the singer herself), the vice president — who was never a particularly known quantity among young voters — is suddenly having a social media moment.

The vibe shift can be quantified. As recently as May, The New York Times reported that there was nearly twice as much pro-Trump content on TikTok as pro-Biden content, a vulnerability for Democrats considering that Gen Z is critical to their coalition and 32% of the cohort get their news from TikTok.

In the past week, however, “80 percent of the top-performing TikTok content about Harris has been positive, compared to only 19 percent positive for top-performing content mentioning Trump,” Puck News reported on Monday. Noting that Harris was being mentioned in almost as many TikTok videos as the former president, Puck added: “Democrats have never ever found a way to rival Trump’s attentional powers across screens—until now.”

But are the Harris videos on TikTok moment representative of a surge in support among young voters — who were deeply unenthusiastic about the prospect of voting for Biden — or merely a passing fad on social media?

One young voter who has flipped from “undecided” to voting Democratic since the Biden swap is Elise Joshi, a 22-year-old social media activist. Joshi is the executive director of Gen Z for Change, a group that has had a notable evolution in recent years — it was founded as “TikTok for Biden” in 2020, but has since grown increasingly critical of the administration over its support for Israel and approval of fossil fuel projects.

Joshi told me in a recent phone interview that she voted “uncommitted” in the California primary this year and was finding it “very difficult” to contemplate supporting Biden in November. “And I think that completely completely changes with this new situation,” she added.

Gen Z for Change had conspicuously declined to endorse Biden (their former namesake) throughout his re-election bid; within hours of him dropping out, it was like a switch had flipped. “In light of this announcement, Gen Z for Change will be dedicated to mobilizing young voters in support of Vice President Kamala Harris,” the group promised.

Asked how Harris should be positioning herself to gain more Gen Z support, Joshi had a clear policy prescription. “In terms of increasing the pool of people that go from hesitant to vote for Joe Biden to very interested and excited to vote for Kamala, that can get a lot bigger if she does champion the issues that we’ve been talking about,” Joshi told me. “I expect her to have to answer questions of whether she supports a Green New Deal and Medicare For All, or versions of universal health care, and I would encourage her campaign to embrace the progressive agenda that young people are seeking in this moment, in order to make that flip possible.”

Yesterday, though, I spent time at a gathering of Democrats with the exact opposite advice for Harris’ campaign. WelcomePAC is a group that promotes more moderate Democratic candidates and encourages the party, as its website puts it, to reach out to “future former Republicans” in order to build a winning coalition.

At its “WelcomeFest” conference in D.C. on Tuesday — a place where “reclaiming the American flag” was a top applause line and a “turn-and-talk” exercise for attendees asked, “When have you felt community with the middle?” — several speakers emphasized that the path for Democrats to win Gen Z ran through the center.

“Left-wing activists and nonprofits are lying about young and nonwhite voters,” read one slide at a polling presentation given during the conference. “The median young voter self-identifies as moderate,” read another.

One of the “Welcome Fast” speakers was Olivia Julianna, a 21-year-old activist who commands a nearly 700,000-strong following on TikTok. I spoke with her on the sidelines of the conference, where she told me — contra Joshi — that Harris would be unwise to take “very aesthetic, very superficial” stances like supporting Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. “Saying that we have to campaign to young people on policy matters that will not pass, I find to be very disingenuous and I think that it sets people up to have young voters disappointed,” Julianna told me. (Julianna formerly worked at Gen Z for Change, but has since split ways with the group.)

Julianna and WelcomePAC point to polling that shows inflation and health care are the most important issues to young voters, far outpacing Israel/Palestine and climate change. When I brought up that data to Joshi, she responded with statistics of her own, pointing to surveys that reflect high Gen Z sympathy for Palestinians and high concern about climate change.

As I’ve written previously, young voters are famously difficult to poll. Much of this divide is also about which questions you ask and how you phrase them: if you ask Gen Z respondents which issues they prioritize, you’ll generally get answers that mimic older voters (as Julianna argues), but if you ask for their stances on a wider range of issues, the answers will often skew more to the left than for other generations (as Joshi points out).

So far, faced with that nuanced muddle — and groups attempting to promote competing sets of data —the Harris campaign has sought to adopt something of a “both/and” strategy, said Rachel Janfaza, a journalist who closely tracks the youth vote in her newsletter “The Up and Up.”

“They’re capitalizing on [the sudden wave of organic TikTok content] and sort of letting the winds of the viral media ecosystem tell them what direction they should be following,” Janfaza told me.

Indeed, in my conversations with activists on both sides of this divide, it felt like they were all trying to project their own visions of Harris onto her — and that her campaign was more than content to let that ride for as long as possible.

“In 2020, Kamala Harris ran as a Green New Deal candidate,” Joshi told me. “She’s a co-founder of the Green New Deal… As attorney general, she sued Big Oil companies for their environmental justice malpractices. She sued, not just Big Oil companies, but she sued ConocoPhillips, which is the company behind the Willow Project, which the Biden administration approved.”

Contrast that with WelcomePAC, whose most recent blog post proclaims that “Kamala is Moderate,” asserting that the more progressive 2020 stances cited by Joshi were driven by Harris’ campaign team, while “Kamala The Human Being” is more centrist by nature.

At the “Welcome Fest” event, I heard more than one comparison between the energy felt by Democrats now and how they felt in 2008, during the rise of Barack Obama. One way that parallel felt true: Harris, like Obama, is something of an ideological blank slate — because she’s taken stances across the spectrum (and flip-flopped several times on many of them), she’s able to be all things to all people, stitching together disparate factions of the Democratic coalition by the power of malleability.

“You know, it seems that Joe Biden being 81 years old, he might be more ideologically stiff when it comes to Israel/Palestine,” Joshi said, citing one issue her group has worked on. “And Kamala Harris has indicated that that she is not as supportive of Israel unconditionally in the way that Joe Biden is, that we will be able to move her more than [him].”

Except, of course, Harris was Biden’s own vice president; she hasn’t distanced herself from him much on Middle East policy, or any other issues. But Harris is boosted by the uniting force that is running against Donald Trump — and the energizing force that is not being in an octogenarian. As I tried to parse from Joshi why her group declined to endorse Biden, but immediately leapt off the sidelines for his running mate, it seemed somewhat like progressives had been waiting for a permission structure to rally against Trump, and Harris was the vessel who provided it.

And it doesn’t hurt that many young people seem to genuinely enjoy the memes about her; the word “fun” came up in several of my conversations. That same quality has long powered Trump’s campaigns; recall the 2023 poll that showed Republican primary voters describing Ron DeSantis as more “likable” and “moral” than Trump, but Trump as more “fun” by a 38-point margin. We all know who won that primary.

“For most young people, social media feeds and ‘for you’ pages are not populated with political content,” Janfaza reminded me. “Most young people are just watching either sports or cooking videos or fashion or influencer-type stuff. Right now, not just is the vice president embracing pop culture, but pop culture is embracing her.”

Organic online content has sprung up around Trump for his entire political career; it almost never did for Biden. Now, Harris is crossing into those same apolitical, entertainment spaces that Trump has long dominated. What is most striking about Harris’ virality is how it seemed to happen almost without her trying — it’s not as though Harris designed her comments about Venn diagrams or coconut trees to spread widely on TikTok.

Instead, they seem to have answered a contradiction that has long been puzzling — if young voters lean so Democratic, why was TikTok so Trump-friendly? Just as progressive activists were waiting for a permission structure to rejoin the Democratic fold, it’s almost as though the Internet was too — waiting for a Democratic candidate who could be promoted without it seeming cringey (Joe Biden) or even cringier (Hillary Clinton). In the Harris memes, left-leaning content creators found their match.

With young voters a critical piece of the election — and apolitical routes critical to reaching them — Trump and Harris are now engaged in an ongoing war for influencers. Last week, Trump declared that “we’re with the young people” in a video with Jake Paul; last night, Harris filmed a video with Megan Thee Stallion. Each video has fetched millions of views on TikTok.

It’s unlikely, though, that Harris will be able to keep the positive vibes going forever. One key crossroads will come in the next week, when she unveils her running mate. “There are vice presidential picks that will make the youth vote more difficult,” Joshi told me, naming Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, for his previous opposition to the labor-backed PRO Act, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, for his support for Israel and school vouchers. (Like other progressives, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is her favorite.)

Julianna, though, expressed a hope that Harris would tap Shapiro, encapsulating the difference in these two former allies’ views on policy and strategy. “To say that Josh Shapiro being picked as vice president would erode the excitement and energy of young voters, I think it’s disingenuous and quite frankly I think it’s antisemitic,” Julianna said, citing his 2022 exit polls to argue that the opposite would occur.

But when I raised the dispute with Janfaza, she shook her head. “Most young people who aren’t paying attention to politics don’t know who Josh Shapiro or Mark Kelly are,” she pointed out. “They also don’t know who Tim Walz is. They also don’t know who Andy Beshear is. They don’t know who these people are — unless maybe they live in one of the states where these are their representatives.”

“Even then,” she continued, “I’ve been to some states where I’ve asked who is your representative, and the people I’m talking to have a hard time coming up with that individual’s name.”

Referring to disengaged voters more broadly, as we stood outside the “Welcome Fest” ballroom, Janfaza added: “I would imagine that those people are more representative of where the average young person stands than the types of folks that are at this conference or any other political conference.”